by Robert M. Sanders
Assistant Professor of Chinese
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Hawaii

1.0 Introduction

Many hours have been spent at scholarly meetings and many
pages of academic writing have been expended discussing what is
to be considered acceptable Mandarin. Very often these
discussions degenerate into simplistic and narrow-minded
statements such as “That’s not the way we say it in
...!” or “We had better ask someone from
Peking.” Objectively speaking, these disagreements on
style reflect a less-than-rigorous definition of which type of
Mandarin each party is referring to. Because there has been a
failure by all concerned to define fully the linguistic and
socio-linguistic parameters of their assumed language(s),
Mandarin oranges are often unwittingly being compared with
Mandarin apples. This paper is a preliminary attempt to
articulate the fundamental differences distinguishing four
major language types subsumed under the single English heading
‘Mandarin’. Though the Chinese terms
putonghua/guoyu, guanhua and
difanghua help to accentuate the conceptual distinctions
distinguishing our four types of Mandarin, it is arguable that
even Chinese scholars are not immune from confusing one
language with another.

2.1 -- The Four Mandarins

One of the hallmarks of twentieth century linguistic science
is the principle that a full linguistic grammar must contain
not just the sounds of the language, or just its vocabulary, or
just its sentence patterns, but rather information about all
three, as well as, depending on the specific philosophical
orientation of the linguist, a set of rules which transforms
its phonology into its lexicon and its lexicon into acceptable
sentences. In addition, socio-linguists have sensitized us to
the need to put language in a social context, giving us
concepts such as speech communities and language variation.
Applying these ideas to the English term
“Mandarin”, it is possible to identify four
distinct language types, one of which can be further
sub-divided into a myriad of unique examples.

2.2 Idealized Mandarin

The first type of “Mandarin” to be recognized is
what is called putonghua - --- on the Chinese mainland,
guoyu in Taiwan, and huayu in Singapore. Outside
of China this (so-called) standard, official Mandarin
corresponds to the language found in textbooks. What
characterizes this language is grammatical underspecification,
a lack of any native speakers and very few truly fluent
speakers. By grammatical underspecification I mean that little
if any information is given by presumably competent authorities
about what words to use and what sentence patterns are correct.
As to this first feature, one need only look to the official
definitions used in Taiwan and on the mainland to confirm just
how underspecified the grammar of Idealized Mandarin really is.
In Taiwan, guoyu

must include the ordinary oral language
and the ordinary words found on the written page. Both of
these are consistent in having a standard pronunciation, a
standard lexicon, and a standard syntax. What is the
standard for guoyu? According to the explanation
included within The Mandarin Pronunciation of Commonly
Used Characters issued by the Ministry of Education,
“The first principle is that the area around Peking
should be taken as the standard; this so-called standard of
course draws upon its modern phonological system, and it is
not the case that the local (e.g. Peking) pronunciation
must be adhered to for every word.”
[2]

This definition, though paying lip service
to the need for addressing guoyu’s lexicon and
syntax, fails miserably in this regard. In the more than fifty
years which have passed since the publication of The
Mandarin Pronunciation of Commonly Used Characters the
Ministry of Education has yet to attempt to codify the specific
lexical items to be included within this language. Likewise, no
pronouncement has ever been made as to which are acceptable
sentence patterns and which are not. On the Chinese mainland
the situation is not any better, where discussions of the
regularization of putonghua note that:

From a historical perspective the
dialect base of the literary language (in the vernacular)
is clearly greater than that of Pekingese, so that if we
wanted to go ahead and limit its syntax and lexicon to that
which is found within the scope of Pekingese, then clearly
this would not be possible. All we want to do is make it
internally consistent and not chaotic. Furthermore,
putonghua has always taken Pekingese as its
phonological standard. [3]

As in the case of guoyu above, the most specific
information about the grammar of putonghua concerns its
pronunciation, and the statements about its lexicon and syntax
are vague to the point of being useless. Though unable to find
a written reference for it, the most often quoted definition of
putonghua states that its phonology is to be based on
“the phonology of Peking,” its lexicon on
“the vocabulary of modern literature,” and its
syntax on “the sentence patterns of northern
China.”

Lacking the specifics for what words should be used and how
this language-by-committee should go about putting them
together to form sentences, it is not surprising that Chinese
in Taiwan and on the mainland, when attempting to speak this
abstract entity, appeal heavily to the lexicon and sentence
patterns found within the natural languages spoken in the
irrespective localities. Thus, what passes for spoken
guoyu/putonghua in China varies greatly from site
to site. Interestingly, it is only the Chinese language student
overseas who does not have to contend with an underspecified
grammar, since textbooks provide him with both a lexical
inventory and a list of acceptable sentence patterns. Because a
student’s knowledge of Chinese is limited solely to what
he finds in the textbook, he necessarily speaks a language very
different from that found anywhere in China. Thus the only
fluent speakers of this idealized language are experienced
language teachers outside of China, who after many years of
tailoring their speech to the knowledge of their students, have
become most proficient in it.

Another trait of Idealized Mandarin is its appeal to the
written language rather than the spoken form as the ultimate
arbiter of grammar. It is a common practice among linguists in
china to base their research not so much on the languages they
hear spoken around them, but rather on a corpus of written
material gleaned from one or more modern novels. The working
assumption seems to be that if material is in a published form,
then it is likely to be linguistically “correct.”
However, if a word or pattern is merely spoken then, regardless
of how frequently it is used, there is no a priori
reason for concluding that it is guoyu/putonghua.
One reason why linguists dealing with Idealized Mandarin have
traditionally emphasized the written language over the spoken
likely relates to its historical background. As Barnes (1982)
notes, the original purpose of guoyu was simply to
codify a standardized pronunciation for use in reading aloud
the written language, and in the process bring this static form
to life. In other words, the written language was taken as
basic, and the spoken language was intended to follow suit.
This faith in the primacy of the written word has caused many
people to believe that it possesses a magical unifying power.
They take it for granted that most everything found upon the
written page is to be found in equal proportions in all
varieties of speech in all regions of Han-speaking China, and
as such ignore important considerations about speech
communities, speech repertoires and frequencies of usage.

2.3 Imperial Mandarin

The second type of language referred to by the term
‘Mandarin’ is the language spoken by the
scholar-official class in imperial China. As with the language
described above, it lacked both a fully codified grammar and
any identifiable native speakers. Likewise, it is doubtful that
it had many fluent speakers. What distinguishes Imperial from
Idealized Mandarin is the former language’s total silence
about the existence of a vocabulary or a syntax, as well as the
imprecise, pre-modern methods available to linguists of that
period for indicating pronunciation. Furthermore, as early
twentieth- century intransigence on the part of educated
Chinese to accept northern pronunciation as the national
standard indicates, the prestige of rhyme books among the
scholarly class was very great. It is unlikely that they were
willing to turn their backs on this phonological system in
favor of something which differed significantly from their
poetic tradition. Since Imperial Mandarin pronunciation could
only be indicated clumsily at best [4], and
since no attention was paid to vocabulary and syntax, we can
speculate that prior to this century there was greater variance
in the style of Imperial Mandarin from region to region than
one finds today among the varieties of Local Mandarin (see
discussion below).

2.4 Geographical Mandarin

This third type of Mandarin is the invention of the
twentieth-century linguist, created in an effort to delineate
the language of a particular area sharing certain common
phonological traits. In particular, this language is defined on
the basis of its geographical distribution, tonal inventory,
and the reflexes of Middle Chinese *voiced initials (both
obstruents and sonorants) and *checked syllables. It is said to
be spoken natively by the great majority of Chinese and
includes:

the area north of the Yangtze, the area
along the southern bank of the Yangtze, east from Jiujiang
and west from Zhenjiang, Hubei (excluding the southeast
corner), Sichuan, Yunnan, northwest Guangxi, and the
northwest corner of Hunan. This linguistic area occupies
three fourths of the surface area of Han-speaking China,
with a speaking population of more than 70% of all the
users of Han Chinese (including Han-speaking minorities
such as the Hui and the Manchus. [5]

Geographical Mandarin is philosophically much like the two
types of Mandarin already discussed in that attention is
focussed exclusively on the phonological system, at the expense
of ignoring lexical and syntactic considerations altogether.
Many prominent Chinese linguists such as Wang Li and Ting
Pang-hsin (both in personal communications with the author)
have argued that the major distinction among Chinese dialects
is phonological in nature, that very few differences can be
found in their lexical and syntactic qualities. Such
conclusions are acceptable only with the qualification that
because phonological differences among dialects are often the
more salient, and because China has a long tradition of
meticulous phonological scholarship, modern dialect
documentation and classification has also naturally been
oriented in this direction. It is only because of this
phonological bias that dialects appear to differ from one
another primarily on the basis of pronunciation. It is
dangerously misleading to assume that lexical and syntactic
considerations are inconsequential, since works such as
Hanyu Fangyan Cihui (1964), Hashimoto (1986), Zhu (1984)
and R. Cheng (1985) attest to striking lexical and syntactic
differences over geographical space.

Another misleading aspect of Geographical Mandarin is the
suggestion that because there exists a set of linguistic
diagnostics common to a large geographical region, there ought
to be a high degree of mutual intelligibility among the
languages distributed within that region. Certainly the degree
of mutual intelligibility within Geographical Mandarin is
remarkably high in light of the linguistic situation outside of
Mandarin-speaking areas. However, one must not forget that this
so-called high degree of mutual intelligibility is only
relative. If one were to take monolingual speakers from the
various speech communities contained within this linguistic
region and bring them face-to-face, we would find the degree of
functional intelligibility would be quite low.

It would seem then that Geographical Mandarin, along with
Idealized Mandarin and Imperial Mandarin, is an intangible
entity. All are severely underspecified in terms of providing
the basic prerequisites for forming a holistic grammatical
system. To some degree there is a phonology, but there is very
little lexicon or syntax. Also all three types of Mandarin, at
least in their working definitions, cannot be represented by a
community of prototypical speakers. As soon as one encounters
an actual spoken vernacular, a careful inspection will reveal
important deviations from the hypothetical standard, as well as
from other equivalent sister vernaculars grouped together under
the same classificatory umbrella. Looking at these three types
of Mandarin from a slightly different perspective, we could say
that given their working definitions, there is no way to
predict the full array of actual linguistic conditions to be
encountered at any given geographical site or speech community.
In order to provide that sort of information we must turn to a
fourth type of Mandarin, one which we shall call Local
Mandarin.

2.5 Local Mandarin

Local Mandarin is simply the recognition that the neat
checklist of linguistic diagnostics prepared by scholars to
delineate Geographical Mandarin is insufficient to account for
the overall grammatical system of any locality situated within
its boundaries. Instead, every locale, because of its unique
demographic history and linguistic composition, is to be
treated as an independent speech community. For example,
observations about Peking speech are relevant only to Peking.
By definition these observations cannot be used to make any
claims about the Mandarin spoken in Tianjin, Shanghai, Kunming
or anywhere else. Likewise, observations about Mandarin spoken
in Taipei or Singapore are relevant only to Taipei and
Singapore. Ideally, studies of Local Mandarin ought to be
grounded in the rigorous techniques of statistical analysis,
providing both quantitative and qualitative information. At the
very least, however, they must respect the principle outlined
above that no speech community can be taken to be
representative of another, without first possessing the
objective data to prove that it can.

One important distinction within Local Mandarin is the
difference between those forms which have developed through
continuous evolution (found primarily in the north), as against
those forms which developed artificially through language
planning within the past half century (found primarily in the
south). In the former case, Mandarin has been the mother tongue
for several centuries and has been influenced very little by
Idealized Mandarin. In the latter case, Mandarin has only been
introduced over the past few decades. This being the case, the
linguistic role model for the first children learning this
language was not their family elders, but rather teachers (who
may or may not themselves have grown up speaking a non-Mandarin
language) and the mass media, two important channels for the
dissemination of Idealized Mandarin, I wish to label those
varieties of Local Mandarin which developed through a centuries
old process of continuous use [+native], and those varieties
which have been spoken in communities only within the past few
decades [-native]. This use of the term “native”
does not mean to imply any degree of superiority or
authenticity. After all, every variety of Local Mandarin is
meant to be taken on its own terms, irrespective of any other
variety. It merely serves to differentiate between endemic and
introduced varieties of speech.

3.0 Conclusions

The most important point that can be made on the basis of
what has been outlined above is that any discussion of an
entity called “Mandarin” must by necessity be very
explicit in identifying the exact type of Mandarin being
discussed. Is one talking about Idealized Mandarin or Local
Mandarin? If it is indeed Local Mandarin, which of its myriad
varieties is being addressed? One should not trivialize the
basic distinctions among these four types of Mandarin.
Idealized Mandarin is based upon ideas about the way language
ought to be; Imperial Mandarin was a highly undernourished
attempt to guide the scholar-official through the linguistic
mysteries of the north; Geographical Mandarin is an artificial
construct: while Local Mandarin is by nature very limited in
its scope. Most problems arise because linguists confuse
Idealized with Local Mandarin, and of ten mix together several
varieties of Local Mandarin to boot. With an understanding
gained from the discussion above, we know that pronouncements
about Idealized Mandarin must necessarily be prescriptive,
while pronouncements about Local Mandarin must necessarily be
descriptive.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was
presented at the twentieth International Conference on
Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, 21-23 August
1987, Vancouver, B.C. Canada.

The two most common methods of indicating
pronunciation in China before the advent of
romanization were the duru and fanqie
systems. In the first method, the character in
question (X) was said to be read like a second
character (Y) whose pronunciation was supposedly
already known to the reader. In the second method,
the syllable of the unknown character (X) was
divided into two parts, an initial consonant and a
final (everything in the syllable except its
initial consonant.) Two characters (A and B) were
then presented, with (A) indicating the correct
initial consonant and (B) indicating the correct
final. Examples of each based on modern Mandarin
pronunciation are:

shui4 ‘tax’, shu3
‘heat’ wei4
‘defend’ qie.
“The word ‘tax’ has the
initial of ‘heat’ and the final of
‘defend.’”

The major problem
with both systems, in addition to their presuppositions
about their readers’ knowledge of written
Chinese, is that they ignore synchronic and diachronic
differences. Over the centuries speech in all regions
of China has been undergoing phonological change, while
each community has been changing at its own rate and in
its own unique direction. In general, however, northern
speech differs much more from the phonological standard
underlying both duru and fanqie than does
southern speech. For example, in most varieties of
northern speech final oral stop consonants have been
lost causing homophony among many groups of finals
which were originally distinct. Such has not taken
place within most southern varieties of speech. Also,
the system of initial consonants differs greatly in
number and type as one moves from one community to
another. The result is that because most characters are
read with different pronunciations by people from
different parts of China, what is a perfect match
between two characters in terms of initial or final in
one variety of speech is often lost in another variety.
Neither southern pronunciation nor a knowledge of the
proper reading of poetry were ever of much help (at
least within the past 800 years) in speaking like a
northerner.

Yuan Jiahua (1960:23).

Bibliography

Barnes, Dale. 1982. Nationalism and the Mandarin Movement:
The first half-century, in Cooper, Robert L. (ed.) Language
Spread. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
260-290.